When I came to the U.S. from Russia as a teenager, I was terrible at being a self: a shadow, like all of us at that age, and one who couldn't form words in English very well, which probably reduced my age even further to my classmates. Being hip seemed hallowed yet almost unreachable. So for the next twenty years I tried and tried to get to the top of Mt. Hip. Eventually I felt I was a cool enough language instructor with a pack of diplomas that said, yes, she is qualified-postqualified. More substantially, earlier, I became a partner to a wonderful person who is fully in his element in American English. And after that, I turned into the object of utterly undeserved adoration and acceptance by a little boy who is both of me and the United States -- for now (we'll see when he's a teenager!).
I'd be lying if I didn't mention dresses. There are twenty or so, they are all kinds of colors and trendy details, heels punching in a double footnote of energy and femininity. Dresses are actually fairly Russian--and I'm finally comfortable being that, too.
All of these ways to assert, again and again, that I'm the real deal, in different ways, to different people, who actually have totally different ideas of cool...
Writing, Marge Piercy says in one of her poems, is something that you have to want more than being loved. Being hip is more or less about being loved.
I wanted to be loved by everyone just like I was back where I was born. This is a story I used to tell myself. It's certainly a selective memory.
The desire to stop putting on hipness like a bright green dress (I own two of those) every morning, for me, is about the discipline (despite the fact that writing can be thankless) and faith in oneself (because one may or may not be thanked at the end) that Piercy implies. But it is about something else too. Affection and yes, even dresses have their place. Without love, and those little nothings, what would we be living with and around? But all that is increasingly insufficient and difficult for me. It's not enough to form a place I could live in.
That place for me is the writing of poetry. I would like to make my writing a space for honest conversation about internal and exterior struggles, for finding compassion. A collaborative space for the kind of quiet dialogue that I so much enjoyed as a child: with literature written close by, and lands away, and centuries out.
That space, as one of my favorite Russian poets Vladimir Gandelsman calls it, is already "here." In one of his poems, we read: "Here is the spot between heaven and earth / Where you are what you can't help being." There is a clear sense that the author is pointing us to a place, as if it were a physical location.
I hope a sort of conversation will let me reach out more fully to people who are going through various struggles, including the political and awful one of being wounded, discriminated against, abused, in silence. I would like not only to chronicle their difficulties (though that is important), but, more importantly, to form a connection with them, perhaps even somehow to connect them to each other.
Olga Livshin
I'd be lying if I didn't mention dresses. There are twenty or so, they are all kinds of colors and trendy details, heels punching in a double footnote of energy and femininity. Dresses are actually fairly Russian--and I'm finally comfortable being that, too.
All of these ways to assert, again and again, that I'm the real deal, in different ways, to different people, who actually have totally different ideas of cool...
Writing, Marge Piercy says in one of her poems, is something that you have to want more than being loved. Being hip is more or less about being loved.
I wanted to be loved by everyone just like I was back where I was born. This is a story I used to tell myself. It's certainly a selective memory.
The desire to stop putting on hipness like a bright green dress (I own two of those) every morning, for me, is about the discipline (despite the fact that writing can be thankless) and faith in oneself (because one may or may not be thanked at the end) that Piercy implies. But it is about something else too. Affection and yes, even dresses have their place. Without love, and those little nothings, what would we be living with and around? But all that is increasingly insufficient and difficult for me. It's not enough to form a place I could live in.
That place for me is the writing of poetry. I would like to make my writing a space for honest conversation about internal and exterior struggles, for finding compassion. A collaborative space for the kind of quiet dialogue that I so much enjoyed as a child: with literature written close by, and lands away, and centuries out.
That space, as one of my favorite Russian poets Vladimir Gandelsman calls it, is already "here." In one of his poems, we read: "Here is the spot between heaven and earth / Where you are what you can't help being." There is a clear sense that the author is pointing us to a place, as if it were a physical location.
I hope a sort of conversation will let me reach out more fully to people who are going through various struggles, including the political and awful one of being wounded, discriminated against, abused, in silence. I would like not only to chronicle their difficulties (though that is important), but, more importantly, to form a connection with them, perhaps even somehow to connect them to each other.
Olga Livshin
